The present invention relates to an automatic travelling apparatus capable of finding out a permissible travelling area for the purpose of permitting a vehicle to automatically run along a road.
Recently, there has been developed such an automatic travelling apparatus which is capable of finding out a permissible travelling area, setting a target course thereon and steering a vehicle to run along the target course.
The automatic travelling apparatus disclosed in the Japanese laid open patent publication No. 199610-88 is intended to continuously take an image of an area ahead of a vehicle in its running direction by an image pick-up device attached to the vehicle; make data processing of the taken image for extracting therefrom continuous line segments such as road edges; determine a permissible travelling area ahead of the vehicle on the basis of the extracted continuous line segments; set a target course in the determined permissible travelling area; estimate a steering amount necessary for following the target course on the basis of the currently detected running condition of the vehicle; and steer the vehicle to follow the target course with reference to the steering amount.
The above-mentioned automatic travelling apparatus is required to stably steer the vehicle by limiting the target steering amount below the maximum permissible steering angle in consideration of the running speed.